Inasmuch as you care about how we find our stories, this one happened quite by accident. It came on the tail end of a trip to Europe for the madness that is the World Barista Championships, held last summer in Rimini, Italy. You lose a couple of days on your way into Europe from the American west coast; sure, convince yourself that you are a master of jet lag by staying up til 10pm the night you arrive, but sooner or later the exhaustion will come, and you’ll have slept 15 hours without meaning to, or be up chattering at 3 am. The only people who are truly resistant to jet lag are drunks: so great is their enthusiasm for the bar, they muster a kind of unnatural adaptation to the strains of travel. To ease this jagged transition, and hopefully avoid the bar too much, we decided to take a weekend off in Amsterdam on the way home–no working, no writing.